Langston Hughes And Cultural Heritage In The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance is a period of time after World War 1 and the Civil War. The Civil War was a tragic event, but it freed all the slaves. This would have been a good thing, except that all the slaves that were enslaved had been slaves their whole lives and didn’t know what to do. These slaves didn’t feel like they were Americans, so a lot of them sailed back to Africa to reunite with their people. There was only one problem, they didn’t speak the same language as the Africans because it wasn’t them that were born there, there ancestors were. In the result of this many sailed back to America and migrated to Harlem, New York on foot. Before the slaves were emancipated, they wanted to be free so bad that they would run away from home. This

Cultural heritage is the legacy of things past down to generation to generation, to help future generations. Hughes helps with this because he knows how to tie in facts that will happen in the future that doesn’t only help us now, but it did then. The poems he writes are brilliantly written and understood by many people. Poems are things that many people can relate to by taking different aspects from them and applying them to their lives. Langston Hughes understands the concept of this. According to an article in America’s Stories, “His literary works helped shape American literature and politics” (Stories). This quote shows that he knows about what might happen in the future and this is what he is doing when he uses cultural heritage. Hughes’s poem I, Too is all about cultural heritage. One of the famous lines in the poem states, “Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, Eat in the kitchen, Then.” This quote shows that in the future nobody will judge the narrator for his race. This is when the cultural heritage comes in in his poems. Right here is a great example of cultural heritage because it is predicting something that is going to happen in the future. Now reading this poem he or she know that this is true, but when Hughes was living he didn’t know for sure that this was going to happen.

Clifton was one poet that knew how to slip in futuristic comments that helped out the good of the community. She may not have known that someday she was going to be famous for them, but she was clever enough to understand how to put in cultural heritage that would become influential in time to come. Josephine Cameron states that, “I believe it is so important to remember things like Slaveships and to write poetry and sing songs and teach our children about them” (Cameron). This quote shows that many of Clifton’s poetry help many different people out and show them what exactly cultural heritage is. Her poetry by itself is a cultural heritage because we are using it now. This is a magnificent concept, this is because with this poetry, he or she can see what concepts were being learned back when the Harlem Renaissance was going on. Many of Clifton’s poetry are about singing. This line from her poem Study the Masters shows he or she this, “You would understand form and line and discipline and order and america.” This shows a lot about how Clifton writes. Many interesting things come out of this poem. One in particular is that she lowercases America. This shows he or she that she still doesn’t see herself as a true American and may have some doubts about what it might mean. Many other things can come from this, especially